


Rooms (Regulus Black)

by onewithroses



Series: Rooms [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Roadmaps, Backstory, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-02
Updated: 2011-02-02
Packaged: 2017-10-15 07:27:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/158467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onewithroses/pseuds/onewithroses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Room studies for characters in the <a href="http://roadmaps.insanejournal.com/profile">RoadMaps</a> Alternate Universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rooms (Regulus Black)

Regulus' favorite place is his bedroom. He likes the line of his desk, the old oak stained so dark and heavy he sometimes thinks the color will come off on his fingers. Its a red lacquer so opaque that out of the light it looks black. He saw it once when Kreatcher was repairing his room for the New Year. He had dipped his fingers into the canister and they came out blood red. He'd washed it off quickly, but without a spell it left a blotchy pink shadow crawling up his hand. He left it on for four hours before his mother asked him what it was and he scrubbed it off with an empty answer.

He likes his book piles, two stacks of three—always. He leaves them pressed across the far edge of the desk just under the windowsill. Sometimes they are school books, other times wand lore, or a book on remedial potions that filters in and out as he forgets little details. He rarely opens them. He uses his notes instead, which he keeps in the center top drawer. Each packet is labeled and sectioned with binding spells.

His bed takes up the wall across from his bedroom door. Its bond to the wall is so tight that it's hard to see where the bed ends and the wall begins. When he was a child the bed scared him. At night there are faces looking down at him from the post boards: long nosed Blacks with sunken cheeks and hooded eyes. The bed was his great grandfather's before him and he always thought he could hear Cygnus sigh from the wood. It used to scare him but it doesn't anymore.

Regulus uses three blankets and two pillows even during the summer when the heat is high or in the late spring and early fall when he leaves the windows illicitly open. He likes the sounds of the outdoors, though he'd never admit it normally. His mother hexed the windows shut when he was ten and petulant. Kreatcher slammed his head against the dresser and bookcases that take up the wall beside the door twenty times when he lifted the lock to let Regulus stick his head out the window. He had been excited and breathless, pink cheeked with his fingers curled over the ledge and his house-elf standing a foot away looking worried. He had wanted to catch the first sight of his brother returning from Hogwarts for the first time. He never waited again.

He keeps his wand supplies in a chest charmed to be the width of three books next to the bedside table. His mother gave it to him and he has never asked what she used it for. It has a hundred pouches, a hundred places, so he can tuck away every whisk of unicorn's hair and every can of wand polish or whittling knives.

Once he covered his free walls with newspaper clippings of everything he thought was far grander than his life. A purpose, he supposed, was a good thing to have. What more could someone want than something to attune themselves to and work hard for? What's left of those clippings hang in tatters like spider webs and they creep all the way up the ceiling.


End file.
